decision making

So, while the advertising industry is in the midst of profound change, it’s hard to be certain about the form that it will take in future. There’s good reason to be optimistic, rather than pessimistic. Firstly, as we saw earlier, the proliferation of digital platforms means that there are now more canvases for creativity than ever before. And secondly, recent discoveries in psychology and behavioural science have highlighted how human decision making – in any context – is often unconscious or non-rational. As a result, the range of problems where creative communication can offer a solution is wider than ever previously realised.

For increasing numbers of organizations, the new reality for development, deployment and delivery of applications and services is hybrid cloud. Few, if any, organizations are going to move all their strategic workloads to the cloud, but virtually every enterprise is embracing cloud for a wide variety of requirements.
To accelerate innovation, improve the IT delivery economic model and reduce risk, organizations need to combine data and experience in a cognitive model that yields deeper and more meaningful insights for smarter decisionmaking. Whether the user needs a data set maintained in house for customer analytics or access to a cloud-based data store for assessing marketing program results — or any other business need — a high-performance, highly available, mixed-load database platform is required.

More so than ever before, agility matters.
A shifting competitive landscape along with heightened
customer demands, technological transformations, digital
disruptions and a host of other trends, combine to create
distinct challenges for business operations executives.
Achieving and maintaining a competitive edge in this climate
requires an advanced framework for pivoting whenever
needed—with minimal cost, maximum efficiency and optimal
outcomes. The question for every enterprise in the current
environment: Do we have the required agility to drive
decision-making capabilities that will continuously sharpen our
competitive edge?

The shift from a product- to a service-driven economy—mixed with an uncertain economic climate—has given finance teams the opportunity to become strategic business partners capable of shaping and guiding organisational decision-making. This partnership is only possible by creating a deeper understanding of the contextual factors that influence revenue and profit and loss, and making this analytical data available to the right stakeholders when they need it. That requires a fundamental change in the way finance teams think about technology.

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) isn’t just about aligning supply and demand. Ultimately, businesses across all industries need to synchronize plans across all functions to strike the right balance between demand, resources and other constraints. Companies are realizing that their use of analytics to help improve decision making needs to evolve beyond just reporting to include machine learning and optimization.
Download our latest Q&A now with published author and supply chain expert Mike Watson, and learn how virtually any S&OP decision can benefit from advanced analytics and automation. You’ll get practical advice to help build a strawman, so you can move forward quickly – before your competitors!
Read this Executive Brief to know the Top 7 Questions to ask before deploying your Sales and Operations planning.

Machine learning is all around us, from our smart home applications to driverless automobiles. The efficiency of automated decision-making is changing the game in cybersecurity, expanding the capabilities of humans by sifting through enormous quantities of data and presenting it as actionable intelligence.
Machine learning makes security teams better, and vice versa. Human-machine teams deliver the best of both worlds, allowing endpoint security to continually evolve to stop new attack tactics. Your team deserves the best that cybersecurity has to offer, and today the best endpoint security products leverage machine learning.

As every business decision-maker should now know, the E.U. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcement date is coming. The GDPR will be enforced starting May 2018 and will apply to those collecting, storing or using the personal data of the residents of the European Union’s 28 member states. The Regulation changes requirements around protecting the personally identifiable information of over 500 million people, and occupies the minds of anyone around the world concerned with data protection.
To better understand data decision-making, McAfee® commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey the views of 800 senior business professionals across eight countries around the world from a range of industry sectors.

To stay ahead of the competition in a global marketplace, firms are increasingly speeding up operations, in many cases adopting real-time systems and tools to allow for instant decision-making and faster business cycles. Download here to learn how.

This paper outlines the seven essential buying criteria that every decision-maker needs to consider when making a decision on a video delivery provider. These buying criteria are shared across the gamut of small, video-centric startups and established, familiar media giants.

Better health care at lower costs, for everyone – how do health care providers get there? Understanding the gaps in patient care, patient needs, and the geographic distribution of the patient population are important elements to consider when making decisions about improving the quality of care and reducing its costs.
To effectively analyze gaps in patient care, the data needs to be in a single place or system. However, in many organizations, data is spread across a myriad of spreadsheets and database systems. Data not organized for visual exploration and coherent analysis isn’t useful for decision making. Hence the need for visually appealing and scalable analytical tools to help organizations be more efficient, effective and economically successful.

Data Governance has emerged as the point of convergence for people, technology and process in order to manage the crucial data (information) of an enterprise. This is a vital link in the overall ongoing data management process for it maintains the quality of data and makes it available to a wide range of decision making hierarchy across an organization

SAP Jam is a cloud-based social software platform that transforms the way people work by bringing together people, data, and decision-making capabilities when and where workers need them. In this Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study commissioned by SAP, learn about the potential return on investment you can realize by deploying SAP Jam.

The technology market is giving significant attention to Big Data and analytics as a way to provide insight for decision making support; but how far along is the adoption of these technologies across manufacturing organizations? During a February 2013 survey of over 100 manufacturers we examined behaviors of organizations that measure effective decision making as part of their enterprise performance management efforts. This Analyst Insight paper reveals the results of this survey.

Enterprises are looking to innovations like big data, cloud-based services and mobile apps to improve decision making and accelerate business results. But legacy IT implementations—independent compute, storage and networking platforms, veneered with a hypervisor— often can’t deliver on the increased agility, scalability and price performance demands of this new era of IT.

Offices aren’t productivity factories anymore—they’re collaboration centers where individuals and groups can develop their best ideas. That means building out an office takes a whole new approach, and it isn’t just about using aesthetics and shiny toys to attract top talent (although that is part of it). Successful offices are functional tools that bring technology and people together so they can do their best work. Cisco® Collaboration tools bring people together to speed the decision-making process and help you execute on your most innovative ideas while cutting operational waste. Bring Cisco Collaboration to your workplace and create a workplace that works.

Businesses today expect finance to play an extended role across departments, including IT, human resources, compliance, operations, sales, marketing, and most importantly, corporate strategy.To successfully deliver on this role, the finance function needs to play a bigger and visible role in real-time decision making and continuous planning. This report explores how, using cloud and analytics, finance leaders can leapfrog a few generations of technology and offer mature analytical feature/functionality and skills to the entire organization.

When determining which investments to make in their technology infrastructure, organizations will often choose to make no changes at all. While this decision avoids short-term costs and business disruption, it often simply delays the inevitable—even making it worse.
The cost of doing nothing is expensive in the long term. This report—from the independent researchers at Aberdeen Group—outlines the reasons distributors choose not to upgrade enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and cautions against this approach, supplying detailed research that illustrates the benefits of keeping your systems current.
Download this report to learn how a new or improved ERP system can help get you the information you need to make informed decisions and act more efficiently, improving overall company performance.

Oracle commissioned Forrester to interview 498 marketing decision-makers from across the US and Europe, finding that most companies are in the process of evolving marketing practices, but on average they are only about halfway to the goal of becoming customer obsessed or modern marketers. Read all the results. Get the report.

Using IBM Watson’s cognitive capabilities, companies can quickly differentiate their customer service quality by being more pro active and responsive to customer needs. Simply put, chatbots and virtual agents are the future of customer interactions. Building apps from scratch that incorporate natural language processing, speech to text recognition, visual recognition, analytics, and artificial intelligence requires broad expertise in these disciplines, large staffs, and a huge financial commitment. Making use of IBM Watson cognitive services brings these capabilities in-house quickly and without the capital investment that would be needed to develop the technologies within an organization.

Having local expertise on each side of the water helped to address the customer’s concerns and data center requirements at each level of its decision making process. How do you go about finding the right provider for your business?

Offices aren’t productivity factories anymore—they’re collaboration centers where individuals and groups can develop their best ideas. That means building out an office takes a whole new approach, and it isn’t just about using aesthetics and shiny toys to attract top talent (although that is part of it). Successful offices are functional tools that bring technology and people together so they can do their best work. Cisco® Collaboration tools bring people together to speed the decision-making process and help you execute on your most innovative ideas while cutting operational waste. Bring Cisco Collaboration to your workplace and create a workplace that works.

Commercial launch is a critical and complex period in the Life Sciences product life cycle. The transition from clinical development to commercial operations can seem overwhelming as companies face considerable challenges in transforming from an R&D-driven organization to one focused on achieving in-market business and commercial excellence. Core to successful launches is preparing the company for a whole new raft of capabilities, processes, and relationships, and in doing so there are a number of factors included in this checklist that companies should consider and questions they should answer.

HP delivers the complete, end-to-end unified communication and collaboration solutions and services you need to improve decision making, increase customer satisfaction, and drive business results. HP Flex-Bundles for UCC with Microsoft Lync 2013 get you up and running quickly, and help you improve your network to grow your business. Download this white paper to learn more about how Microsoft Lync and HP can build a productive workforce.

Is turning data into information still a challenge for your company? If so, you are not alone. View this on-demand Webinar with SAP and HP to learn how you can manage ever-increasing amounts of data; provide this data to business users to make critical decisions in a timely fashion; and enable true self-service business intelligence (BI) for business users.